The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Current parts lifecycle analysis systems and methods do not consider common attributes between parts from the same or different manufacturers. For example, assume that a particular part ABC has a particular coating, and that part ABC has an expected part lifespan or has an identified non-conformance. It is currently not impossible to review all of the parts in a system that may include the particular coating because of the huge numbers and diverse nature of parts that use the coating. This is especially so in complex manufacturing processes, for example in building commercial aircraft, where vast numbers of parts are involved in the construction of such an aircraft.
Thus, there presently is no means for focusing, in a rapid and orderly manner, on those parts that may be similar to a particular part or that have characteristics in common with the particular part. Thus, even if one should determine that a part or a component of a subassembly having a particular attribute should be reviewed, using that information to evaluate the lifecycle of similar parts or similar components of a subassembly has not been achieved.
Also, databases which have been used in the past for tracking part information have often been quite extensive in size. Such databases often may contain textual content that is input by a large number of different individuals, possibly designers, producers, operators, technicians, maintenance personnel, etc. As a result, differences in vernacular used to describe characteristics of parts or other features of the components involved is very common. Thus, there exists a continual challenge to extract pertinent information from large volumes of current and historical free text, which leads to a multitude of correlation issues that add to the complexity of a part/component lifecycle analysis. This also gives rise to a plethora of computational and analytic problems. The usual result is long analysis and mitigation times which lead to high costs, which thus can be very burdening if not unacceptable for many businesses, governmental operations or manufacturing entities. These limitations also make it difficult, if not impossible, to use the available stored non-conformance information in a proactive manner to efficiently manage the lifecycles of parts or components.